Counting can be used to find out “how many” is in a collection.

How much? and How many? are fundamental “Big Idea” questions that are so embedded in our everyday life that we often are not conscious that in fact we are doing math. We think of counting the children on the bus at the end of a field trip as a safety issue; or our focus is on balancing storage space and our family’s eating habits when we calculate how many juice boxes, yogurts or cans of soup we want to stock up on during a sale.

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Traditions around food and feasts provide rich opportunities to connect math at school with children’s experiences at home. From Diwali to Thanksgiving, fall is a season of special meals with loved ones.

Five Little Goldfish

"This is math, of course, but it's not math. It's a game. I keep it a game by not belaboring mathematical ideas or concepts. Yes, I use terms like 'addition' and 'subtraction' and 'equals,' when I can as part of the natural flow of things, because it's always good to introduce vocabulary words 'in context.' I support the kids in any way necessary to help them figure out how many fish they have."

All kinds of confusion can result when children are asked to rattle off the numbers from 1 to 10 or 20 or higher without actually counting something. In our learning labs and activities we are working to help teachers find ways to avoid “Naked Numbers

After reading Anno’s Counting Book, Nancy Beza at Waters Elementary encouraged her preschoolers to make a list of objects that could be found in a winter scene—snowflakes, trees, etc. Each student created an object from the list to display on a bulletin board.

Daniela Giralt at Gunsaulus Elementary, a 2010-11 Early Math participant, used the book Dog’s Colorful Day by Emma Dodd to help her preschoolers explore the Big Ideas of counting. First in the whole group, children added dots to a large dog as Ms. Giralt read the story. During the reading, she stopped to ask, “How many stains do you see now? How many stains do you think there will be if we add one more? How many stains are left after the dog takes a bath?